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Creator / Mark Hamill

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mark_hamill_1.jpg
HEY KIDS, IT'S MARK HAMILL! (applause)

"One of the things that I love about voiceover is that it's a situation where – because you're not encumbered by being seen – it's liberating. You're able to make broad choices that you would never make if you were on camera."

Better known as Luke Skywalker, The Joker, Fire Lord Ozai, Colonel Muska or Christopher Blair, Mark Richard Hamill (born September 25, 1951 in Oakland, California) is an American actor who first came to prominence as one of the best young talents of The '70s.

Though praised for a strong performance as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars franchise, he could never match the success of his most famous role. Despite being typecast, he was frequently in demand and performed in several lesser known films before turning more to theater (not just to pay the bills, but because he preferred it), eventually getting juicy lead roles in big plays on Broadway like Amadeus and The Elephant Man. (Actors who had seen his performances include Jackie Gleason, Christopher Walken, and even the great Katharine Hepburn, who met Hamill backstage.)

Hamill has also become one of the most acclaimed voice actors in the industry. He's best known for playing dynamic, outright evil villains (ironically, considering his previous typecasting as a hero fighting against The Dark Side) in animation; most notably The Joker as stated earlier, with many considering his to be the definitive interpretation of the character. He's actually a swell guy in real life, despite the typecasting.

There is a persistent story about Hamill getting in a severe car accident that caused serious facial injuries that required reconstructive surgery,note  and many believe that this is the real reason for his character being all banged up early in The Empire Strikes Back. But Hamill refutes this, saying he just suffered some scratches and a broken nose and he doesn't understand how the incident was blown so far out of proportion. It is, however, why he resembled a Ken doll in the infamous The Star Wars Holiday Special, as the accident happened not long before.

Hamill's career came full circle in 2014, when he lent his villain-voicing expertise to Star Wars: The Clone Wars as Darth Bane, and then it was announced he'd reprise his role of Luke Skywalker in the Disney-produced sequel trilogy starting with The Force Awakens, and he then reprised his role as the Trickster in the CW Flash series. All of which earned him no small amount of critical acclaim, with the Darth Bane role even earning him an Emmy nomination. Life is good for everyone's favorite Jedi, it seems.

Be sure to check out his Twitter and Instagram accounts, which are often filled with hilarious stuff.

Mark Hamill's roles include:

    Mark Hamill's Roles 

Mark Hamill's works provide examples of:

  • 10-Minute Retirement: Had famously announced that Batman: Arkham City would be the last time he would voice the Joker. For better or worse, that didn't stick. He retired from the role a second time in early 2023 a few weeks after the passing of Kevin Conroy. This one might actually stick since he would blindly accept projects once he was told that Conroy had also signed up, since he trusted and enjoyed working with him that much.
  • Added Alliterative Appeal: He invents unique hashtags for his tweets, usually being alliterative.
  • Ax-Crazy: A lot of his voice acting roles are unhinged and sociopathic villains. The Joker is the obvious standout but plenty of others such as Fire Lord Ozai count too.
  • But for Me, It Was Tuesday: When a Yakuza fan approached him on Twitter, Hamill confessed that he had no idea who Goro Majima was, and that he had done so much voice work in his career that he couldn't remember all of his roles. He also stated he'd forgotten that he voiced Chucky in a Robot Chicken sketch, after he was announced to reprise his role in Child's Play (2019).
  • Career Resurrection: After the release of Return of the Jedi, Hamill didn't have a huge amount of work that wasn't directly tied to Star Wars. Then, in 1992, his portrayal of the Joker gave him massive acclaim, giving him an entirely new niche as a world-class voice actor, almost universally as villains, ironically enough. Everything then came full-circle when he voiced an apparition of Darth Bane in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and he later returned to the role of Luke for the Sequel Trilogy.
  • Creepy High-Pitched Voice: Despite playing a lot of villains with deep voices, his trademark Joker voice is rather high-pitched, making him sound clownish yet unpleasant.
  • Crossover: In 2020, Hamill filmed several ads for Uber Eats with Patrick Stewart.note 
  • Evil Laugh: Due to voicing The Joker since 1992, he has this down to an art formnote . It's been close to three decades as of this last edit, and we're still not sure what he's inhaling to do these laughs. It's safe to say that his Joker laugh is among the most distinctive and iconic villainous laughs in animation history, alongside those that Lucille La Verne, Betty Lou Gerson, Pat Carroll, and Jonathan Freeman provided for Queen Grimhilde, Cruella de Vil, Ursula and Jafar, respectively.
  • Evil Is Hammy: Many of his villainous roles tend to be grandiose, particularly The Joker.
  • Flip-Flop of God: Whether he's done voicing the Joker or not. At first, he said that Batman: Arkham Asylum would be his last time. But then came back for DC Universe Online and Batman: Arkham City, and said that the latter would be his last time, with Richard Epcar from Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe stepping in for Injustice: Gods Among Us and Infinite Crisis, and Troy Baker in Batman: Arkham Origins, Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate, and Batman: Assault on Arkham, despite the presence of Kevin Conroy in most of those projects.note  Despite Batman: Arkham Knight opening with the Joker's cremation, he reprised the role in flashbacks and hallucinations. He has, however, made it clear that he will come back for an Animated Adaptation for The Killing Joke—then came back for Justice League Action. And yes, Hamill did voice the Joker in Batman: The Killing Joke. And then he came back for Justice League Action and LEGO DC Super-Villains a few years later, but he didn't reprise the role in Batman vs. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (where both Batman and Joker were voiced by Troy Baker), so it comes and goes. However, with the death of Kevin Conroy, he has announced his retirement from the role, noting that it wouldn't be the same for him without Conroy.
    “They would call and say, ‘They want you to do the Joker,’ and my only question was, ‘Is Kevin Batman?’ If they said yes, I would say, ‘I’m in.’ We were like partners. We were like Laurel and Hardy. Without Kevin there, there doesn’t seem to be a Batman for me.”
  • Friendship on the Set:
    • He and his co-star, the late Carrie Fisher, became very close on the set of Star Wars, with a Like Brother and Sister relationship that endured for the rest of their lives. Her death in 2016 left him in almost Stunned Silence, and it is abundantly clear that he was and remains absolutely shattered by her loss.
    • Ironically, despite voicing Batman's archenemy, he was friends with Batman: The Animated Series star Kevin Conroy and was similarly devastated by his death.
  • Guttural Growler: Roles like Skips and Ozai are pretty big examples.
  • Large Ham: Absolutely, and especially when he plays villains.
  • Man of a Thousand Voices: Hamill has voiced characters of remarkably different vocal ranges and types over the years. If you talked to him not knowing he was a voice actor, you'd be shocked at some of the characters he's portrayed.
  • Meaningful Name: Twice over the dude is such a Large Ham that it makes sense his last name is Hamill, also when it comes to the Joker specifically there is Markhamill.
  • Pigeonholed Voice Actor: The poster boy of this trope. Thanks to his role as The Joker, he is often typecast into villainous roles.
  • Playing Against Type:
    • Ironically, his most famous role is this, as 90% of his roles nowadays are villains — some of whom, like The Joker and Fire Lord Ozai, have him on the other side of the Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred! trope, of which he was on the receiving end in said trope-naming scene.
    • On the voice acting side, there's also Skips from Regular Show (who is the Only Sane Man), The Larry 3000 on Time Squad (who does amoral things and sometimes takes a level in jerkass, but isn't really a villain), and one-time character, Leavelle the Body Guard School Instructor on The Simpsons episode "Mayored to the Mob" (who does berate the students in his class, but that's more of a Drill Sergeant Nasty way). As for lesser-known characters, Hamill voiced the snack-sneaking cat Dom on the Playhouse Disney series Tasty Time with ZeFronk.
    • Invincible (2021) sees him voice Art Rosenbaum, who's nether a supervillain nor a major hero, but an ordinary guy who just so happens to design costumes for superheroes.
    • Possibly one of the earliest video game examples appears in Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers, where he plays neither hero nor villain, but the main character's bumbling Friend on the Force.
  • Those Two Guys: With Kevin Conroy as the Batman and the Joker. Following Conroy's death, Hamill had stated that "he [Conroy] would always be [his] Batman".
  • Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil / Worthy Opponent: When Futurama was once again renewed in 2022 without Bender's Voice Actor John DiMaggio returning, Mark quickly went to Twitter to state that out of respect for a fellow veteran Voice Actor, he will NEVER audition for Bender. (DiMaggio would eventually return to the role following continued negotations.)
  • Vocal Evolution: His voice has gotten hoarser and lower-pitched as he's aged. This is especially noticeable in long-running characters like the Joker when comparing his earlier work with his more recent performances. Credit to him, the hoarser and lower pitched voice has made his Joker laugh even scarier as time has gone on.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • After playing the lead in Amadeus on stage, he auditioned in the hope of getting the role in Miloš Forman's movie, without success. (Of course, to be fair, the actor Forman ultimately chose — Tom "Quasimodo" Hulce — turned in a superb performance.)
    • Hamill was almost tricked into appearing in the documentary The People Vs. George Lucas, but he quickly realized, even before the title was finalized, that it had an anti-Lucas vibe to it, and refused to take any part in it.
    • Early in production of Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Hamill was considered for the part of Gaetan Molière, before Corey Burton got the part.

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